03 March 2013

"Insofar as there remains a kind of questioning thinking in philosophyand art beyond or outside or beside reason consummated in a purportedlyfinal, settled, absolute knowledge and ethical life, i.e. a kind of thinking in thelacuna outside reason’s ambit hitherto, more or less in conformity with anhistorically given casting of being, the recognition accorded to individualself-consciousness as citizen by the “honour through the office that itholds, through the business it operates and through its other workingactivity” (Ehre durch das Amt, das er bekleidet, durch das von ihmbetriebene Gewerbe und durch seine sonstige arbeitende Tätigkeit, Hegel Enz.§ 432 Add.) itself becomes vain and empty and cannot satisfy vital,singular, thinking, questioning individuality. An uncanny hiatus, be it atfirst ever so slight and inconspicuous, opens up, or rather, singularity anduniversality were never truly closed together in a final historicalconclusion. Even in being acknowledged abstractly in its individual humanrights and enjoying the freedom of movement of particularity (which arethe great historical achievements of the West), singular individualitytherefore remains always eerily unhoused, ‘unbelonging’ and isolated(vereinzelt, singularized, individualized) in the midst of historicallyrealized, ethically cemented reason, for it is left ill at ease with the claim ofinfinite, absolute reason to have attained final historical consummation inthe social institutions of substantive, consolidated, objective spirit thatpurportedly constitute self-consciousness’s highest identity, its ostensiblyunsurpassable, sublime belongingness to the world. In such an ever-brokenmediation between singularity and universality concretely realized inethical life, historical time sputters." (p.562) Read on in Social Ontology.